Glossing was an important element of medieval western manuscript culture. However, glosses are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their triviality, fluid nature, heterogeneity of origin, complex transmission histories, and anonymity. Traditional scholarly approaches such as close reading and the genealogical method often do not produce…[Read more]

The Norse poem Atlakviða shows an irregular metre which is difficult to classify. This makes it a useful test case for comparing the explanatory abilities of two major theoretical frameworks of Germanic alliterative verse: the positional theory and the word-foot theory. I argue that the word-foot theory is more successful, especially in deriving…[Read more]

The trend of Carolingian royal advice literature, Fürstenspiegel, or specula principum offers advice to kings on how to rule well and examples of ruling poorly. Interpretations of these texts have often focused on traditional ideas of the Carolingian reforms, for example the focus on classical models of rule in Sedulius Scottus’ De rectoribus ch…[Read more]

Thijs Porck, “I can read Hollandsch very fairly. The Correspondence between James Murray (1837-1915) and Pieter Jacob Cosijn (1840-1899)”, in Language Use, Usage Guides, and Linguistic Norms, ed. Luisella Caon, Marion Elenbaas & Janet Grijzenhout (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021), 107-129.

Despite the epistemological importance of the scholarly journal, few thorough histories of individual academic journals have been written, especially of journals in the arts and humanities. This article uses both archival material and oral histories to construct a multifaceted history of Leeds Studies in English (LSE) from the beginning of its…[Read more]

When considering the establishment of overseas viking encampments, some of the most detailed and vivid contemporary descriptions of this activity originate from the Frankish realm, a region which nevertheless remains precariously positioned in wider comparative investigations of the viking world. To address this imbalance, this chapter assembles…[Read more]

This preface introduces in the main issues of the volume.

Die Vita der heiligen Adelheid von Vilich, geschrieben um 1056/57, wird vor dem Hintergrund ihres Entstehungskontextes interpretiert.

Lotharingia and East Francia: Marriage as a Political Instrument? – Kings and nobles arranged marriages for their daughters in order to form or strengthen po- litical alliances. Historical writers of the tenth century interpreted the relations of the Ottonian kings Henry I and Otto I with the Lotharingian dukes Giselbert and Conrad the Red in t…[Read more]

The seventh-century Regula cuiusdam ad uirgines (Someone’s Rule for Virgins), which was most likely written by Jonas of Bobbio, the hagiographer of the Irish monk Columbanus, forms an ideal point of departure for writing a new history of the emergence of Western monasticism understood as a history of the individual and collective attempt to p…[Read more]

This chapter is published within Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Porck and Soper. Please email me if you would like to cite it and I will send you a PDF with page numbers.

This chapter traces cross-communal interactions in the fields of medicine, mathematics and what the historical actors called the natural sciences. It discusses various modern interpretations of those interactions and engages with a number of historical problems researchers face when studying the extant sources. After a substantive survey of the…[Read more]

Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides criti…[Read more]

The ninth-century Annales Fontanellenses are a concise set of monastic annals composed by the community of St Wandrille, situated along the lower reaches of the river Seine. Covering the 840s and 850s, their contents are concerned with a relatively brief but highly tumultuous period in the history of the Frankish realm, representing an eclectic…[Read more]

Britain’s second-longest early medieval monument – Wat’s Dyke – was a component of an early medieval hydraulic frontier zone rather than primarily serving as a symbol of power, a fixed territorial border or a military stop-line. Wat’s Dyke was not only created to monitor and control mobility over land, but specifically did so through its careful a…[Read more]

Often neglected and misunderstood, there are considerable challenges to digital and real-world public engagement with Britain’s third-longest linear monument, Wat’s Dyke (Williams 2020a). To foster public education and understanding regarding of Wat’s Dyke’s relationship to the broader story of Anglo-Welsh borderlands, but also to encoura…[Read more]

We hope this comic heritage trail for Wrexham helps introduce you to Britain’s third-longest ancient monument

This article introduces the third volume of the Offa’s Dyke Journal (ODJ). As well as reviewing ODJ 3’s contents, I present reviews of the journal received to date, notable new publications on linear monuments, and the Collaboratory’s key activities during 2021. The context and significance of the research network’s ongoing endeavours are present…[Read more]

Introduction to the collected essays of Professor Dai Morgan Evans

Review of Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon, by Megan E. Hartman, Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter, 2020, pp. XII + 213, £83.00, ISBN: 978-1-5015-1832-4